WWII aircraft armament machine guns and cannon

[davidsog]

Did either side experiment with say a 12mm or smaller cannon round.

There was some experimentation with incendiary rounds with some degree of success. The British formula seemed to be better than ours.
12mm just does not have enough space to fit any meaningful amount of explosive.

One of the things that made Mk108 so successful was type of explosive the Germans used. It wasn't TNT, it was PETN. PETN was invented by the Germans and much improved in WWII. It has a TNT equivalency of 1.66. So the Mk108 carried far less amount of actual explosive to achieve the effect of a 1/4 lb block of TNT.

[davidsog]

Bombs and rockets were not precision nor was the bombing methods.

Actually, in post war assessments....

Bombs turned out to the most effective anti-tank weapons employed by aircraft in WWII. You did not have to have a direct hit either. The shockwave would kill or incapacitate the crew just landing near the tank.

Even then, bombs might have been more effective than anything else but they weren't super effective either. The sources I have read that tally numbers of tanks killed to numbers claimed tends to be about 2%-6% or actual kills to claims.

In the Battle of Caen, the RAF claimed hundreds of German tanks killed by Typhoons and other Tank Busting A/C. Of 300 destroyed German tanks examined after the battle....

Only 10 were even damaged due to aerial strikes and none of them knocked out because of it.

The 2nd TAF and 9th USAAF involvement in the Normandy campaign...

The Germans lost ~100 tanks to enemy action. Only 13 could be attributed to Aircraft. 7 of those tanks were destroyed by B-17's carpet bombing their assembly areas.

So 6 tanks in the entire Battle of Normandy were taken out by the entire Allied Tactical Air effort.

[Pumpkin]

As they would have said “Buggered that one”.

[davidsog]

As they would have said “Buggered that one”.

Yep. It's one of the reasons why Battle Damage Assessment (BDA) is so important and gets so much emphasis in today's warfighter.

All sides thought Airplanes were just awesome at killing tanks. Come to find out they were not once BDA started happening.

The lack of BDA caused numerous mistakes during the war. The Luftwaffe stopped attacking Radar sites in the BoB, stopped attacking Allied escorts over the channel to force them to discard their drop tanks, and gave almost no actual support to the JaboGeschwader's in the "Tip and Run Campaign.

All sides put huge efforts into developing dedicated Anti-Tank aerial weapons and specialized airplanes only to find out they all were very ineffective.

Its not that Ground Attack did not work, it did. But the payoff was other targets than tanks. Bombs and rockets were not precision nor was the bombing methods.

That's exactly it. Infact, I would say the psychological effect was more devastating than any actual attack. I am will to bet more tanks got stuck in ditches trying to get off the road with a panicked driver than were ever even damaged from the aerial attack. Perfectly good tanks that ended up being abandoned because they had no recovery vehicles or time to recover it.

[RC20]

Actually, in post war assessments....

Done by the Air Corp. So yea, awfull claims.

If you can't hit it then it does no good and an HE bomb has to land perfecly to take out a tank. Same with rockets, they were area affect weapons.

Note what the Chieftain posted data wise and the USAF killed more tanks than the North Koreans had. Then they did it again and came up with even more tanks that did not exist.

AAC had an axe to grind and so did the USAF. Shameless. Fortunate they did good work overall and was more than worth it. Tanks go no where if they don't have a fuel truck handy.

Then the Army came by on the ground and found all of the tanks were killed by other means than air.

[44 AMP]

If you can't hit it then it does no good and an HE bomb has to land perfecly to take out a tank. Same with rockets, they were area affect weapons.

Not sure what you mean by "perfectly". A bomb does not have to directly impact a tank to knock it out. Area effect weapons are just that, they affect everything within their blast radius area.

I wonder what the Soviet assessment of air attacks against tanks were. Considering the Soviet system and how it influenced everything they did, I would not expect an unbiased assessment. What I would expect of anything allowed to be published under the Soviet regime, I would expect something like "our stuff was great, theirs was crap". SO, not helpful in that regard.

And the Nazis had their influence also, but I think to a lesser degree than the Soviets. No one's post battle assessment is perfect, though since WWII we have worked hard to do better than they did then.

There is another factor at work here, not yet mentioned, and it concerns the post battle assessments conclusions. And that is the fact that both ground and air units would fire on enemy tanks that might be "live". It was a standard practice for US tankers to put a round, or three into any German armor they spotted, "just in case". And aircraft did attack tanks because unless they were seen to be on fire, or obviously destroyed, they might be live. So, its entirely possible that the assessment teams found tanks that had been shot up by both air and ground forces, with no way to know which one actually killed the tank and which one simply shot up the vehicle at a later time.

I have no idea how much situations like this skew the statistics, but I feel sure they must, to some degree.

[RC20]

Unless it was the Marines aircraft would not be that close to ground troops, they were the mid to longer distance attack mechanism.

We have actual data you discount.

A Dive Bomber was lucky to hit a carrier anywhere. Few dive bombers in Europe on the US side and the Germans went with 40 mm cannon (again huge numbers cited, actual camera pictures no - and they were fighting solo)

Dive Bombers could miss by hundreds of yards (and did). Pilots had not sight or mechanism other than a guess for glide bombing.

Like the Brew Up Sherman myth, you are wrong per data.

AAC, RAF, USAF, they always insisted they could win the war all by themselves.

With precision weapons they can now hit tanks from the air, They still cannot win wars without boots on the ground.

[44 AMP]

Unless it was the Marines aircraft would not be that close to ground troops, they were the mid to longer distance attack mechanism.

Seems like an over simple generalization to me.

We have actual data you discount.

yep, I discount what I consider flawed data, and I particularly discount flawed conclusions from valid data. Just as you discount actual first hand accounts from the people who were there.

Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. WWII was better documented (on our side, particularly) than any previous war, but the documentation is far from complete or completely accurate. Post battle and post war assessments discounted a number of things that the people who were there said happened, and likely credited some things that didn't happen.

I just saw a story of a fellow who put 6 bazookas on his Grasshopper (military version of a Piper Cub) and attacked German armor during the battle of the Bulge. He was officially credited with destroying 6 German tanks (includer 2 Tigers) and damaging a dozen others. Got medals for doing so.

"Mad" Jack Cram ferried a pair of torpedoes to Guadalcanal on his PBY. After getting there, and learning there were no operable torpedo bombers at the time, he devised a way to drop the torpedoes and attacked Japanese shipping with them. Got a hit, too, if I recall correctly.

A Dive Bomber was lucky to hit a carrier anywhere.

Guess were really lucky at Midway. 4 Japanese carriers sunk, by dive bombers. Dick Best is in the history books as being the only man to make hits on two carriers in the same battle.

Dive Bombers could miss by hundreds of yards (and did).

Yes, they can, and many did. But some pilots were better than that. More than a few.

Pilots had not sight or mechanism other than a guess for glide bombing.

Glide bombing and dive bombing are very different modes of attack. Dive bombers had sights for dive bombing, and some pilots were quite good at it, in every air force.

Like the Brew Up Sherman myth, you are wrong per data.

Possibly, but what you call a myth is what numerous veterans who had Shermans shot out from under them have reported. 3 out of 5 times catching fire seems to be the average.

AAC, RAF, USAF, they always insisted they could win the war all by themselves.

So did the Luftwaffe (or at least Goering). None did all by themselves.

Small point of order, the USAF (United States Air Force) did not exist until 1947. Before that, the air force was part of the Army. AAC (Army Air Corps).

Aircraft can destroy the enemy, but they cannot hold ground. Boots on the ground are needed for that.

[105kw]

The USAAC became the USAAF on June 20, 1941.
The AAF became the USAF on September 18, 1947